


home is not a place (but a wish your heart makes)

by captainkilly



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: First Kiss, Fluff, Light Angst, M/M, Tumblr Prompt, it's amazing what happens when Leckie stops thinking and starts doing, we all say thank you Hoosier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:26:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25999723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainkilly/pseuds/captainkilly
Summary: A kitchen table conversation turns into something more.
Relationships: Robert Leckie/Bill "Hoosier" Smith
Comments: 8
Kudos: 32





	home is not a place (but a wish your heart makes)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Tumblr prompt "kisses exchanged as they move around, hitting the edges of tables or nearly tripping over things on the floor before making it to the sofa, or bed", given to me by _hellitwasyoufirstsergeant_. I thought I knew how this was going to go, but turns out these guys need the taste of angst before things can turn good.

* * *

The world stops making sense on a Tuesday.

Robert Leckie isn’t sure if it’s because the Monday that came before it was already calamitous, or if this particular Tuesday just decided to flare up in full apocalyptic swing all on its own. Whatever the cause, he does not feel as though it should interfere with his coffee _or_ his peace of mind.

He has never been as lucky as his nickname might suggest he is.

“Say that again,” he demands, “but slower.”

“It’s not bad.”

Hoosier, being Hoosier, doesn’t listen to the request to slow down. His approval – or, rather, his lack of outright disapproval – is as rushed as it was the first time he voiced it. It’s as if the words do not want to take up residence in the man’s mouth, as though all they want to be are guests that pass through and are never seen again.

All Leckie can do is stare as Hoosier’s hands set the stack of typed, written, underlined, scratched out, scribbled papers down on the kitchen table. There seems to be nothing organized about them anymore, haphazard as the pile has become, and not for the first time Leckie wishes he had added page numbers to this chaos. Hoosier’s long fingers remain curled around the top page. His thumb caresses the bottom lines a moment, or so Leckie thinks, but then the man’s hand flattens the page and Hoosier’s head tilts back as if to challenge him.

“And now you’re stuck.”

It sounds like condemnation, in which Hoosier is the most fluent of all men he knows.

“Now I’m stuck,” he confirms.

His own fingers tap out an impatient rhythm against the kitchen counter. He refuses to look at Hoosier or at the pile of writing to which he has added nothing for weeks now. Instead, his eyes fix on the empty champagne bottle that sits on the windowsill. Sunlight filters through the greens of the glass and makes its shape on the floor dance with streaks of occasional yellow. The label’s not survived Chuckler and Runner, who’d passed it back and forth between them at lightning speed the evening before yesterday. It hangs by a thread the same way his sanity does.

“You need to unfuck yourself, Leckie.”

The condemnation is a slow and easy drawl now. There’s a pitch to Hoosier’s voice – low and steady in a way that takes up residence at the base of Leckie’s spine – that works the same way muscle memory does. Leckie stands a little taller, stops the tapping of his fingers, and tilts his head to the sound.

“How do you propose I do that?” he asks. Can’t help but scowl at the suggestion. If it was as easy as _unfucking himself_ , he wouldn’t be standing here discussing writer’s block with a man who never once wanted to hear anything about his writing before. “I wrote all I can. I don’t think there are words for the rest.”

“There are,” argues Hoosier, “but you ignore them. You spend so much time describing places and people – _thank you_ for that glowing endorsement of how stupid we were in boot camp, by the way –” he sneers, “and yet you gloss over some of the most important stuff in there.”

“Like what?”

“Bob,” says Hoosier then, and Leckie’s eyes snap to him in an instant. He’s certain he’s never heard that particular one of his nicknames cross Hoosier’s lips before. Just as he thinks he imagined it, Hoosier says it again but softer than before. “Bob. Everything changed in that war. Everything, including you.”

“Don’t you think I know that?”

He’s not sure why his voice shakes. He’s not at all certain why he’s having trouble meeting Hoosier’s eyes now, after spending so long seeking them out in the midst of the chaos they were stranded in. He has given so much of his time to being afraid. Has spent ages dissecting his fear the way one would a novel, as though he would somehow be able to capture in words what twists and burns low in his gut. The pages on the kitchen table are an exercise in how much he fails at lending the feeling any means of description.

“Do you still believe more in ammunition than you do in God?”

The question hangs suspended in the morning air until Leckie blinks and feels it drop somewhere deep inside him. Feels it wrench its way through the fear that lingers on his tongue even now, through the sickly swaying feeling that reminds him of the first time he entered a boat, through the barriers he’s cultivated over the years to stop himself from thinking about how he lost his way.

“I sometimes think I don’t believe in anything,” he whispers, finally, and has to squeeze his hand tight into a fist to stop the queasiness from kicking in. “I wish I could believe in God again, you know? It felt easy. Easier than now.” He scoffs out a harsh laugh. Raises his eyes to the ceiling he’s never managed to paint fully white. “Haven’t had cause to believe in ammunition now that we’re at peace. Maybe that’s half the damn issue.”

“We’re home, but we’re not.”

Hoosier’s eyes have softened. They are not midnight blue any longer, harsh in this first light of day, but rather the brighter blue that reminds of sea and sky. Within them lies something mercurial, glinting brightest silver in this sunlight before it fades to gold, and Leckie shivers at the implication. He’s never learned to dance well with Hoosier’s mood when it shifts and turns like this, with every new word another tightrope walk he knows will make him fall.

“I’ve never been home a day in my life.” Leckie’s gaze meets the floor. He looks at his own bare feet, at the threadbare hem of his pants, and knows that if he blinks just once it’ll be like he never left the island. “I don’t think I’m meant to have one.”

“You don’t think you _deserve_ to have one.” The other man’s voice cuts like a knife. Twists in his gut, sharp and swift and altogether deadly, and leaves Leckie breathless with the audacity of it. “It’s the reason why you’re stuck. Not just in the writing, but in everything.”

“Fuck you,” Leckie says, but there’s no venom behind it. The fight leaves his fists before he can even consider raising them. “Why wouldn’t I deserve it?”

“You tell me.”

It’s a challenge, he knows. It’s designed to trip him up, make him falter, let him stumble. Hoosier’s voice is too calm. His eyes are too steady. The tilt of his head isn’t designed for a fight, and Leckie finds himself floundering at the flare of genuine interest that lurks in the set of the man’s shoulders as he leans forward. His throat is dry, suddenly, mouth and airways both constricting at the lack of breath in his chest, and he rasps out a stammer of words that mean absolutely nothing at all.

“Bob.” There it is again. That name, said in that voice, in that soft tone he knows Hoosier never once reserved for him before. “It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not.” He grasps empty space. Gestures weakly with his hands as though he can somehow find something in the air itself to hold on to. He bites his lip, bites his tongue, and shifts back and forth on his feet as if that’ll help him make this feeling dissipate. “I c-can’t – I just –” he gestures, again, powerless against being uprooted like this, “I don’t..”

“All right. Don’t put yourself out, all right? It’s okay.”

Hoosier rises from his chair. Takes one step toward Leckie. Then another. The kitchen feels entirely too small for both of them now. It’s as though every particle of air contains Hoosier, charged and static in every desperate breath Leckie attempts to take. If there is something tentative in Hoosier’s steps, Leckie couldn’t tell. If there is something inside the man that doesn’t feel assured of what comes next, it is lost on Leckie. He breathes Hoosier in. Never wants to exhale again.

“God doesn’t know shit, okay, Leckie? Neither does anyone else.” Hoosier’s voice is no more than a whisper, as if he is afraid of invoking some kind of divine wrath with his words. “There’s nothing that could ever make you not deserve a home.”

“Except the way I feel.” _About you._

“Not even that.”

Hoosier’s hands reach for him. He flinches.

“I’m s-sorry.” He stammers the apology out instantly. Doesn’t think he could stand if it Hoosier walked away. Doesn’t think he would be able to come back if Hoosier left him, now. “Just.. I just..”

“I’m not going to hurt you, okay?” Hoosier’s hands remain outstretched. Palms upward, as if raising them in supplication to a god neither one of them wants to believe in anymore. “You’re a realist, Leckie. Tell me what you see.”

_Safety. Trust. Openness wrought through shared hardship. A chance to belong. A way to be myself._

“You.”

He says only the one word. Doesn’t know if it’s enough for Hoosier. It’s everything for him.

“Come home, Bob.”

He allows Hoosier’s hands to bridge the gap between them. Shivers, mesmerized, as the man’s fingers slowly entangle with his own. The thumb that caressed his words on paper now moves across his skin in reassuring circles.

Leckie takes a deep breath. Then another. Finds himself leaning in, leaning forward, leaning toward Hoosier as though he is the flower and Hoosier the sun.

“How?” he asks. He isn’t sure of where home is supposed to be. “How do I do that?”

“Well.” Hoosier’s head tilts in contemplation. The man’s smile is slow. Tentative, even. “I imagine it would be something like this.”

Hoosier’s hands wrap even tighter around his own. There is no more space between them, not now that the man steps forward until his body is pressed up against Leckie’s. They are chest to chest in the quiet of this Tuesday morning. The counter’s edge presses into Leckie’s back, which makes him lean forward more. Makes him lean into Hoosier.

The touch of Hoosier’s lips against his is so light that it barely leaves a trace. There’s something infinitely gentle in the soft press of these lips, something reverent even, and there is no expectation of reciprocity hidden inside them.

Something shifts in Leckie’s chest as Hoosier pulls away all too soon. The sight of the almost bashful smile on the man’s face brings forth a memory of the hot Australian sun and an even softer touch from the man who just kissed him. He almost freezes as Hoosier’s head begins to lower.

Leckie’s lips are on Hoosier’s before the man’s head can lower altogether. His kiss is anything but soft – he kisses hard enough to leave a bruise, hard enough to make the doubts in his head shut up – and his grip on Hoosier’s hands turns desperate. He doesn’t want to be without this. Doesn’t want to be without this feeling that flutters in his chest and lands in his belly.

“Bill,” he whispers, as if saying the man’s real name is going to anchor him in this reality with Leckie. He prays the name against the man’s lips, around his tongue, in every breath that reaches out of him and finds another breath to take in. “Hoos.” He exhales the nickname between kisses. “Stay. Stay.”

“Not going anywhere, Lucky.” The laugh is small. Genuine because of it. The answering kiss, even more so. “You all right?”

“Yeah.” He’s almost surprised to find he means it. Shakes his head in disbelief. “Why do I feel like this is.. making up for lost time?”

“Told you,” says Hoosier, entirely too smug, “you needed to unfuck yourself.”

“I don’t feel unfucked yet.”

“Do you want to feel like that?” The man’s voice pitches low as he murmurs the question against Leckie’s mouth. Hoosier’s tongue traces his lips achingly, tantalizingly slow before it dips between them with teasing flicks that make Leckie’s insides feel like they are unraveling. “Do you want to feel unfucked, hm?”

“Only when you are the one making me feel like that,” he replies, brushing noses and foreheads with the man he knows he loves. There is something reckless inside of him that reminds him of all the times he looked up in the midst of combat and found Hoosier looking back at him. “Go ahead.” He issues the invitation. “Unfuck me.”

Their lips meet again, and this time there’s nothing slow or easy about the touch. There’s something of battle in this clash of mouths, this demanding push and pull of tongues and teeth and gasps of breath, and Leckie knows he will yield before the night is done. He relents even now, allowing Hoosier’s hands to guide him through the kitchen and toward the hallway.

He pushes Hoosier up against the door; Hoosier pushes him against the wall. They push and pull and hunger and crave in a dance that leaves them banging up against the painting Leckie hung in the hallway, slamming into the table on which he always leaves his keys, hitting the stair’s banister side by side and laughing about it against each other’s necks. He winds around Hoosier, kissing and demanding and laughing even as the man’s strong hands press him up against the wall once more and grab his hips hard enough to bruise.

Leckie gasps out delight as the hands leave his hips and land in his hair with a grip firm enough to make his eyes roll into the back of his skull. He’s liquid want beneath Hoosier’s mouth even as they almost trip and fall on the staircase with only Leckie’s own hands to steady them. He laughs at Hoosier’s bemused blink, then notes the man’s rapidly darkening eyes with a strange kind of giddiness he knows he’s never felt around anyone else before. He shivers with the knowledge that it is he who causes midnight itself to tilt and shift in Hoosier’s eyes.

“Are you sure of this?” Hoosier’s grip on the stair’s banister is white-knuckled. “Do you still want this?”

“I want you,” he says, brave and stupid all at once, and steps onto the first floor’s landing. He finds the words he has been stuck on all along. Meets Hoosier’s darkened, frenzied eyes fearlessly. “I want to come home to you.”

Hoosier all but stumbles into him, lips crashing onto his, hands tracing lazy but deliberate circles onto his bare skin beneath his shirt. He moans into the man’s mouth even as the doorpost presses against his back and he hits his knee against the door while wrapping one leg around Hoosier’s. They laugh and almost fall into the bedroom moments after Hoosier flings the door open and pushes Leckie through.

Leckie pulls him close, closer than he has ever dared, and kisses him all the way to the bed.


End file.
